out and spend the foreign currency abroad. As for taking out some Indian currency to pay your taxi fare on return, forget it. You’ll be committing a crime.
Why should you have to clear customs when you leave India? Isn’t it just another example of government gone berserk? After a little reflection, I realized that if once you accept the necessity of controlling foreign exchange, many other controls follow naturally. Exports are controlled by inspectors, documents and exchange control specialists as people can keep their export earnings abroad. Talk about control breeding controls! The answer lies not in trying to control and control still more but in decontrol. Eliminate foreign exchange restrictions and many other controls impinging on our liberty become superfluous as well.
Today, it may be difficult to imagine travel without formalities and permissions, but it was not so long ago that people could travel to most parts of the world virtually unhindered. Now, most of us have resigned ourselves to queuing at airports, immigration counters, embassies for visas and being subjected to intrusive and invidious customs checks by ill mannered minions of authority.
Business India (October 14, 1991) carried a story about the success of Indians making a career in computers in the “Silicon Valley” in the USA. Some of them tried to interest their USA employers to invest in India, but the hurdles of petty officialdom sabotaged most projects.
An Indian entrepreneur from the valley wanted to bring in a computer workstation (paid for with his own dollars) to set up a software company in Bangalore. He was asked by a senior DoE (Department of Electronics) official in Delhi to produce a certificate from a lawyer that his computer was fit for software development! The president of the Silicon Valley Indian Professionals Association, Prakash Chandra, commented: “These officials should be willing to help rather than crease problems for the businessman before a foreign investor – NRI or Non NRI – feel confident about investing in India.”
Think of the last time you, or a friend, arrived back in India. How long did it take you to clear immigration, exchange control and customs? If you were coming from Dubai, Hong Kong or Singapore, probably as long as the flight you came in on! And the procedure would have left you feeling like a criminal. Tavleen Singh writes in Indian Express on June 19, 1994:
If Nehruvians need a lesson in just how vicious the babucracy can be, they need to spend a morning at any of our international airports. There, they would get a chance to see just how badly Indian workers returning from foreign lands get treated when they return to the motherland. These workers went abroad without any help from the Government. Many sold off all their meager assets to go and sweat their guts out, alone and friendless, in some of the most unattractive countries in the world, so that they could send valuable foreign India, The Third World: Why?
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